


by fire

by ruinga



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Gen, General, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:37:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5450276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruinga/pseuds/ruinga
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why is she waiting so long? Well, she's almost got the words, but the world is burning, and there's so much to do.  She just needs a little more time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	by fire

“I’m staying.” She says. “I’m staying with Cloud.”

They protest, but she holds her ground, for this. She looks very tired, very small, her eyes dark and red-rimmed, her hands folding, one over the other, rubbing her knuckles, her wrists. Nervous. She is not accustomed to this, to being firm. She doesn’t like to inconvenience anyone. She doesn’t want to cause trouble.

“I’m staying,” she says again. They leave her there, and when Barrett looks over his shoulder he sees the way her body dips, slumps, before she disappears into the tiny hospital again.

\---

She talks to Cloud even though he won’t answer. Can’t. He watches her blankly, sick and hunched over, the bright electric blue of his eyes glazed and unseeing. He’s been sick a long time, though only she knows that. She sees the way his blood works beneath his skin, veins rolling in rapid waves. The blood there is too dark. Black. Mako poisoning, the doctor explains to her. He is a kind old man with a weathered face and gentle hands, and he breaks down the illness to her in simple terms, not knowing that she knows what it is already, that she’s seen it before.

“Cloud? We should go out and see the sea today. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She is careful as she guides the wheelchair down and out of sleepy Mideel. The waves crest over the shore, gently, gently. “Do you remember, when we went to Costa del Sol? The waves got pretty big, right? I’d never seen a beach like that before then, but I suppose you might have, when you were…”

“Hey, Cloud. There’s a little dog that follows me around everywhere. I saw him today...I’ve always wanted a dog. I think you mentioned liking dogs. Maybe I should name him? I wonder if he belongs to anyone…” The little dog trots beside them. It’s night. Here, the lights are low and the village is surrounded by a sea of forest, green and endless. The stars are bright, twinkling things. She can see thousands of them, but Cloud can’t even lift his head.

“Cloud, you know.” She rests on her side in a stiff hospital bed, watching him. Her eyes are wide, haunted, pupils blown wide open. In the dark, the fingers of one hand move over the knuckles of another, over and over. She’s mumbling to herself in fragments, starting with one sentence and ending with another. The nurse never says anything. It’s happened before. “I wish you were here. I don’t think I have anyone else, I don’t...I didn’t know how to tell you. You were sick, and I thought...Is that how I should start? ...No, no. I shouldn’t.” Her knuckles run over her mouth. “No. That’s the wrong way, it’s...I shouldn’t.”

“...I’ll try tomorrow. Goodnight, Cloud.”

\---

How to say it? That the world burned down and she was left barely conscious, drifting along an ocean of pain, of agony. It burned all in her throat, her chest, down her stomach. She’d lost so much blood, and someone was carrying her. Every few steps she was jostled, and it felt as if her ribs were cracking, like twigs carelessly stepped on. She hiccuped and blood bubbled in the back of her throat. There was ash in her nose.

“Tifa, sweetheart, you’ve got to stay awake. Just a little longer. You’re a strong girl, I know you can…”

A garbled response. Every word was a struggle; everything was muffled. She was drowning. Someone was staring down at her and his face was a halo of darkness. “...Papa?”

“No.” The face turned away. “...You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.” Warmth tingled in the broad jagged wound of her chest. It helped, a little. It happened again, again, a fourth time. The pain receded, then returned, and with it came the cold. She was buried under the snow, a small twisted thing at the bottom of a dark mountain path, and people were screaming, rolling her over, checking for a pulse.

“You’re a strong girl.”

She fell asleep and felt bad for it. He’d asked her to stay awake.

\---

 

“There you are. Well, hello.” A man with a weathered face and gentle hands smiles down at her. She’s never seen him before. There’s gauze all over her chest, and she thinks it must be in her ears too, because his voice is distant and faraway, strange. It’s an accent she can’t place, slicker and more polished than Nibelheim voices, which were sleepy with syllables that moved over one another, lazy drawling sounds. “You toughed it out. Zangan said you would.”

She tries to talk and can’t manage, not yet. He raises a hand, shakes his head. “Just relax. Everything’s taken care of. You’re in Midgar. You were hurt very badly, but the worst of it is over now. You’ll have to take it easy for a while. No fighting -- I understand you’re one of Zangan’s pupils, but your body can’t take it yet. You’ll be up to form in no time, I’m sure.” His eyes cast away and she thinks that is bad, a bad sign. That he’s lying.

“Midgar?” She asks. Her voice is hoarse, rubbed to nearly nothing. Midgar is across the ocean. A city of steel and brick, with bright advertisements and people in fashionable clothing. She remembers this from a magazine that she and her friends had giggled over during a late spring afternoon. What was in was _rustic!_ Advertisements showing cutesy leather boots and vests that stopped right above the waist, wide-brimmed hats. She’d clipped away the outfit she liked most from one of the pages and pulled out her mother’s machine to sew it together herself, begged her father for the hat that would finish it. He special ordered it for her birthday and she’d thought, _I’ll wear it when the soldiers come to look at the reactor._

She lurches over, gags. It hurts even to do this. She retches so violently she’s sure she’ll tear the stitches holding her body together. The doctor presses a soft hand to her back and tells her to relax, relax, it’s only the pain medication. Sometimes it makes people nauseous, but it’s all right. She’ll be just fine. It’s a lot to take in, he knows. He asks her if she’s hungry, if she wants to sleep.

She isn’t hungry, but he’s been so nice. She doesn’t want to upset him. She eats and it doesn’t taste like anything.

She falls asleep again.

\---

Weeks pass. It doesn’t rain in Midgar, doesn’t snow. There is no sunlight. Sometimes she smells something unpleasant, something like ozone. She asks the doctor and he says it’s from the reactors. Weeks pass and she finally sees the scar that tore her down the middle. It’s stitched professionally, but it’s ugly and dark and will never go away. She doesn’t feel anything at all.

When she is well enough to walk and move around, the doctor tells her there’s a girl around her age, in Sector 5. This is how Midgar towns are referred to, she’s noticed. 5 and 7 and 3. Utilitarian, sparse. Stripped down. He says she sells flowers, and when he told her about Tifa she decided to give her a gift. The gift is mountain flowers. A bouquet wrapped with a gold ribbon, all red and pink and white. The petals are as fragile as snowflakes. She has had a lot of time to read about Midgar, and she knows nothing grows here. The mountains are far, far away. These flowers are freshly picked and healthy, healthier than anything she’s seen for months.

She asks the doctor where the flowers came from, and he smiles, shrugs. “The girl in Sector 5,” is his non-answer. He says when she feels better, she should visit her. She’s a nice girl.

Tifa promises she will, when she feels better. She puts the flowers in a vase in water after cutting the stems and stares at them until the medication makes her sleep again.

She wishes she was dead.

\---

Her chest is an empty, gutted-out hole where her heart used to be before it was cut in half, straight down the middle, burned to ash and embers, but she is a strong girl. She gets stronger. Her stitches are removed, but sometimes her chest burns if she runs too much. She gets winded often. She runs errands for the doctor when she can handle it, and asks him if she needs to pay for anything, if he needs help, and he shakes his head and says no, no, of course not.

Eventually, he earns enough to move his practice to the upper plate. He says he wishes she could go with him, she’s been a joy, such a good young lady, and so smart, but she knows how it is.

She is sixteen years old, and smiles a plastic smile and says, of course. She knows how it is. She can’t be angry at him, anyway. He saved her life, didn’t he?

He ruffles her hair and she helps him carry his bags to the train. She promises to write.

\---

Later,  she goes to Sector 5. There’s a church there, old, dilapidated. Someone has broken one of the stained glass windows on the steeple. She watches a girl with a ribbon in her long, long hair walk toward it. She’s carrying a basket of wildflowers, all red and pink and white. Tifa dips behind a building to watch her.

The girl almost steps inside. Then her head lifts; she frowns, blinks once, slow, as if waking from a long sleep. Her eyes are the soft gentle green of spring grass. She looks right over, right where Tifa is hiding.

“Hello?” Her voice has the slick, polished loop of Midgar natives. She doesn’t sound frightened at all. “Hello?” She asks again. She waits and Tifa’s heart beats so hard in her chest that she starts to feel lightheaded. This was stupid, a mistake. She should have never done this.

The girl waits for a little while longer, then she disappears inside of the church.

Tifa’s chest burns. She slumps against the wall of the building she’s hiding behind and breathes in hard and strangled breaths. She leaves without saying hello.

\---

What is she supposed to say? That she wandered a city she did not know that didn’t know her, a place with people who were too hostile and cold, or worse, too friendly. The kind that leered at her, that said things, that tried to grab her in alleyways. That she disappeared beneath a city buried underneath another one, down, down, beneath the earth. A hell with no sun. That she drifted, lost, begging favors, an errand girl for food, for a night’s shelter. That once a man in a loud suit with slicked-back hair had offered her a job in Wall Market and she would’ve taken it if not for warnings later by the few people that were kind, that told her what kind of place that was and what she would be expected to do.

She gets a job as a bartender because the owner thinks she’s pretty, likes her legs, and the soft lines of her body, and though the age to work in seedy places like this in Midgar and in most places was seventeen, he perhaps feels sorry for her and gets her forged identification. Says that a girl that works down below was a whiz with those things, that she’d pass inspection easy if she went through the checks in the subways.  When she asks what “below,” is, he doesn’t say, but the broad and angry man with a gun for an arm tells her later, boasting, proud.

What is she supposed to tell anyone? That she saw the fliers scattered around Midgar, demanding change, screaming it in angry red letters. _Join AVALANCHE! Down with ShinRa!_ That she’d seen them and a light had sparked in the dead empty place where her heart and her village and her father had been. That the light grew, and grew, until it was a bonfire, a bush fire, a fire that destroyed everything. Destroyed logic and pain and even grief, that it made her live again when she’d spent so long in an in between place, wishing that the job had been finished in Nibelheim.

When she goes down below at last, Barrett claps her shoulder with his good hand and says, “‘Bout time, girl. Let’s get you up to speed.”

\---

What is she supposed to tell Cloud? That she saw him at a train station years later and she and Barrett had thought him a junkie, at first, because of the way his head bobbed and nodded, the way his shoulders twitched. Thought he was one of the people who shuffled through Sector 7 and only talked to beg for gil, for anything, enough to get them by. That she’d only known it was him because he lifted his head long enough for her to see his face, that she had seen the Mako glow and thought, _he made SOLDIER!_ and then, _oh no, what did they do? what did they do to him?_ and she and Barrett had helped him stand to his feet, supporting him on either side, that he was carrying the same sword the dark-haired SOLDIER ( _Zack Fair, First Class! At your service, beautiful_ ) had been carrying, spottled rust-red with old blood. New blood. Blood on the handle, blood all over Cloud’s chest, his face, speckled in the sun blond of his hair.

He looked so sick, and the veins under his skin were rolling in rapid waves. He was clammy, eyes sunken, and when he told her of course he remembered her, they were good friends, right? In Nibelheim, and he hadn’t seen her in what, five years? She almost swallowed her tongue. But she’d smiled and said yes, of course. She said she was so, so happy to see him, that she thought...it didn’t matter. Someone was here now. Someone she knew, who knew her. They’d catch up, and she’d tell him what he missed. That had been the plan, before everything had gone wrong, before she’d seen how sick he _really_ was, that he didn’t remember things he should have, and did remember things he shouldn’t.

That had been the plan. But what is she supposed to say now? That sometimes Barrett had started to ask, and she would scold him before the words were even out of his mouth, that she _had it_ , that he was fine, and why worry? It would be okay. She finally had someone else, someone from home, who remembered the way the mountains looked in the winter when things were snowcapped and cold and quiet, who remembered the little well and the cookies you could only get in Nibelheim, the ones as delicate as sugar floss, who even remembered her mother ( _she was from Wutai, right? I think I remember...she looked like you_ ). What did it matter that he didn’t remember that he wasn’t there for the fire, that he’d never even come home? That she’d asked Zack once, if he’d met anyone with blond hair, with his rank, that if he did, could he give her an address? She’d write to him. What did it matter, that he couldn’t remember that sometimes he got migraines so bad he slumped over, shaking, clutching his head, that he would zone out and stare at her like he had never seen her before? That sometimes Aerith would look over at her, her eyes inscrutable. Waiting. ( _Hello?_ she remembers her saying. She’d been waiting then too.) That he couldn’t even remember the way his limbs had moved forward without him wanting to, that he’d struck Aerith so hard that Tifa could _hear_ it, the snap back of her head rolling on her shoulders, that they’d had to slide and stumble and run down into the chasm the temple had left behind and Tifa hit him back, furious, afraid, hit him so hard that the air left his lungs, so hard she could feel a rib crack, that he’d slumped forward and she’d looked at Barrett, and looked at Aerith holding her face, too startled to be afraid, and only been able to say that it was okay now, she had him.

So, now she doesn’t say anything. Now, even though she is speaking to no one, a nobody person, a man who was a ghost, a crude cobbling together of something not whole, she still can’t say anything. She doesn’t even know where to start.

She’ll try again tomorrow.

 


End file.
